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Published: January 25th 2018
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Training
Volunteers at training. This room is really cold. You know it's cold outside when even the Russian volunteers from Moscow are complaining about the cold. How cold? Here in Gangneung where we are living it has been -14C (Tristan, your homework assignment it to figure out how to convert from degrees Celsius to Fahrenheit. Also, at what temperature are the Celsius and Fahrenheit the same?) (I'm giving my grandson homework assignments while writing this blog.) In PyeongChang, in the mountains it was -20C. There is a high pressure system over western China that is supposed to ease soon.
Wednesday, Jan. 24 We continued our training with an all day session. Many of us will be driving (me included) and we had to get our US driver's license, International Driver's license, and passport copied and sign forms for driver responsibility. The insurance is covered by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the vehicles have access to express lanes and toll booths. Wednesday we drove to venues near Gangneung Village (GVL). I will be using acronyms because it's easier than spelling things out every time. The driving didn't go so well on Wednesday. The Korean guy in our car had Naver Navigation which had errors, and Paula (US volunteer)
had Kakao Map, which was slow, so we would drive by our exit before it told us to turn. Consequently when we drove to PyeongChang Village (PVL) it sent us on a curvy, slow road instead of the super highway. We repeatedly got lost and the task took us a long time. A bit frustrating.
Note about roads: the super highway is great. There's a mountain in the way - put the road through it. Same with trains. Lots of roundabouts too - rule is the car in the roundabout has the right of way. Signage is good, lots of Olympic signs everywhere.
When we got back to the training center they issued all of us phones. Great! I can barely keep track of my phone and now I have two! And they expect us to check email, Kakao talk chat room, and Facebook pages every day. That's alot of stuff to keep track of. Funny thing happened though - in training on Thursday an alert email was sent out and everyone's phone beeped in the room. It was an alert about the cold weather!
Thursday, Jan. 25 Today our training was at PVL. We all
got on the shuttle buses at 8 a.m. (& they finally added more buses because there wasn't enough room for all the volunteers). Our training today was to familiarize us with PVL village and do the driver training again to the venues here. PVL has all the ski, snowboard, bobsled, luge, skeleton events. The venues are spread out a bit. The driving went well today. I downloaded the Kakao map and it was fine. I loaded all the venues into the list so hopefully I can find venues without too much trouble. I'm nervous about the driving because it's a huge responsibility.
Thursday was the coldest day so far. I sure hope it warms up. I have a day off Friday, and Saturday I'll meet with TeamUSA representatives & get my assignment. On FB many of you have asked what I'll be doing. I'll let you know as soon as I know.
Keep those comments coming - I appreciate them.
Sue Pease
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Bobbie Wright
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Hi Sue: Excited to read all your blogs! Hope you an stay warm/. Hugs! Bobbie